This collection arrived for review not long after I'd warmly praised Jeffrey Tate's rather more generous survey of Strauss's concert arrangements of music from his operas (EMI, 4/93). Tate v Mehta, the Rotterdam Philharmonic v the Berlin—it looked as though I might have to eat my words, direct comparison being inevitable since the two biggest pieces—the Frau ohne Schatten Fantasy and the Intermezzo Interludes—are included by both conductors. In fact, though Mehta enjoys himself in the Rosenkavalier waltzes and handles the 'fragment' from Die Liebe der Danae with sensitivity, he seems much less involved with the other music here and—a phrase I never expected to write—on this occasion the Berlin Philharmonic make a less appealing sound than their Dutch colleagues.
Where Tate is very good at distinguishing the operas' different sound-worlds, and affectionately scrupulous in his moulding of Strauss's finely detailed textures, Mehta makes Intermezzo and Die Frau ohne Schatten sound really rather similar. Both lack crispness and character (Barak's wonderful love theme is hasty, Strauss and his friends playing skat in the third Intermezzo Interlude sound half asleep) and both tend towards a sort of over-stuffed grossness of orchestral sound that is appropriate to neither: there is little lightness of touch to the Intermezzo music, still less of nobility to Die Frau. The fact that Mehta does find this latter quality in the Liebe der Danae extract is all the more frustrating, but only for the sake of that nine-minute scene of love and renunciation can his collection be preferred to Tate's. The recording, too, is rather dense and not clearly focused.'